Robert Frost: Party Animal

News broke yesterday that 28 teenagers responsible for wreaking drunken havoc on Robert Frost‘s summer abode in Vermont finally received their punishment. They are to attend a couple of classes with Middlebury College professor Jay Parini, a Frost scholar and biographer, on the “redemptive power of poetry.”

But, what you didn’t know is that the great New England bard might have partied with the kids who trashed his place. We just exchanged emails with Parini. Frost, it seems, liked a stiff drink on occasion.

This goes back to his childhood. His grandparents didn’t want him attending Harvard because they heard it was a drinking school. Frost enrolled at Dartmouth instead, where he promptly joined Theta Delta Chi before dropping out of school two months later. Parini said that in his later years Frost was known to enjoy strawberry daiquiris.

Man, we only wish we could have partied with the guy. Senior year of high school we hosted a house party that led to a night in jail and a two-week stint as the official polisher of the county courthouse’s banisters. Compared to the teenagers who wrecked the summer home of the man responsible for millions of kitschy poems featuring those darn diverging roads, we got off easy: No Iambic pentameter for us.

—DAVID MASHBURN